Jazzy HDD going ons

[0098386]

Heres the problem in a nutshell, sorry I have to be fast, I'm trying to sort it out myself to no avail.

I was rendering a video in Final Cut Express. It froze. I hard-reset my PowerBook. HDD is not recognised (no worries, this happened to me before), so I open up Disk Utility. There they were! Greyed out. I run repair on them, only it takes hours. literally I go for a jog over the hills, I have a shower, I play some DS. Nothing.

It's stuck in some sort of ping-pong motion with;

-Disk Utility sees both partitions of the drive
OR
-Disk Utility sees nothing
OR
-One partition is mounted, one isn't
OR
-Both partitions are mounted.

It's very very confusing. Only they've vanished again. I can't see them now

Any ideas? 😕 this is pretty mad!

Also, why would FCE crash on me? Could I have too many effects on 1 clip?

EDIT: different things happen when it's plugged in with either Firewire or USB too. USB sees the drives better, Firewire is nothing but problematic right now.

 

[Darwin]

I think it would be an idea to backup your data

That is if you are able to 🙁

 

[0098386]

No other help? I made a back up of the important data. but how do I fix this?

I just can't see my external HDD at all. Disk Utility tries to repair disk but with to no avail. it doesnt freeze, just stays on the "checking HFS plus volume" bit. I could leave it there for hours.

Interestingly, it came back on last night. thats when I made the backups. but it went off again, when FCE crashed on me.

what does

Invalid B-tree node size

mean?

 

[0098386]

Verify and Repair disk “disk2s3”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


Verify and Repair disk “disk2s5”
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


2 HFS volumes checked
2 volumes could not be repaired because of an error

... I'm doomed aren't I?
Thankfully the only things on the HDD are files that aren't retreivable, but I can certainly get them again. 16gb iTunes library and several time-lapse photos that can be redone with no problem at all.
Should I bite the bullet and format?